This week’s selections focus on a sort of Captain Obvious statement, but one that presents big challenges to our accustomed thinking when we actually pay attention to it.
We know that most ranges of options actually exist on a continuum, not a binary, whether we’re talking about public policy or what we’re going to have for lunch. Clear black and whites, incontrovertible rights and wrongs, do exist, but most of the issues we face have a range of greys between those poles.
The problem is that our Industrial Era upbringing cast lots of choices that exist on a continuum as arbitrary categories. You were At Work or Not At Work, depending on whether you stuck a little card in a box. You read a Book or a Magazine, with all of the possible arrangements of text and images between those two models somehow not existing. Cars vs. trucks, masculine vs. feminine, liberal vs. conservative… in many situations, the options between run a wide gamut, but the categories obscure as much as they demonstrate.
That might not seem to be a problem, until we realize that the information we’re missing in the gaps between the categories might be crucial to understanding how the world is changing, or is actually different, than we have assumed. In that context, the binary or limited categories look not like helpful tools, but like a set of blinders, blockng us from seeing or understanding potentially important parts of reality.
Try It On
Find a photograph of something very colorful — an aerial of a city, a farmer’s market, etc. Write down a list of all of the colors you see. Use all the color words you know that make sense — chartreuse, lavender, ecru, lime, and so on.
Place that list to one side, and look at the image again. How would your list of colors have changed if I had told you to use only the basic color words — red, green, black, etc. Think of the colors in the 8 pack of crayons, insted of the 64 pack that is probably closer to your first list.
Imagine that you were going to re-color the image, but you only had that 8 pack of crayons to work with. What would be different from the image when you were done? What elements would be obscured? What features would be lost?